Are We More Like Our Moon Over Time?

I can’t recall where I first heard – or read – that we express our Moon sign more than our Sun sign as we become older but it seems sort of legit. The Moon – Luna – represents our inner realm and psyche, which develops over time. 

Additionally, people erupting into early youth usually want cultural cred, to connect with others and/or make an impact. Broadly speaking, the Ascendant dazzles while the Sun self-actualizes and Mercury gathers or transmits intel.

It’s easy and natural to set aside one’s Moon persona in the pursuit of pheromonal Mars-Venus ventures and figuring out how to play the worldly game – aka Jupiter + Saturn.

Anyway, the top picture is the 1995 dressing table of musician Marianne Faithfull, while the bottom pic is her backstage dresser in 1974. The Nineties dresser seems super-Neptunian, as if she was embodying her Pisces Moon by then.

Saturn was in Pisces, she was living “reclusively” in a house called Shell Cottage and was about to launch an album of her own material called A Secret Life. The dressing table is altar-like, with shells, pearls, a coral vase, Tara or Lakshmi statuette (?), crystal letter opener and – in juxtaposition – a little studded punk bracelet.

The 1995 scent is apparently Roger and Gallet’s Jean-Marie Farina cologne – a multi-citrus banger of a scent originally concocted in the 17th Century and adored by Napoleon Bonaparte, amongst others.

A penchant for old-era fragrance is super-Piscean – Sun, Moon, Venus – Pisces anything loves the story and deep time connection. If there was a focus group, fuq it.

Even though the shells came with the house and allowing for the fact she may have foo-fooed her dresser for the photo-shoot, it’s all very Moon in Pisces.

In contrast Faithfull’s 1974 dressing table reflects her multi-Capricorn* – she’s working, starring in a theatre production after a few years of homelessness and drug addiction, a year off her first Saturn Return and newly engaged.

The dresser has sheets of paper with presumably notes or ‘things to do’ scribbled on them and the scent is the iconic, heavy-duty seductress Shalimar, one of the go-tos for Seventies sexpots.

Maybe it wasn’t “safe” to show the Pisces Moon until her mid-90s so it ran beneath everything like a transcendental stream seeking the ocean in vain. You could imagine she’d previously been running on Aries Rising oomph and her hyper-alluring Venus-Jupiter in Scorpio.

Then the crash, burn and multi-Capricorn powered career/life/everything rebirth. She wore Fracas in the Sixties and early Seventies – peak chaos- then Shalimar and her Eighties fragrance was apparently Chanel Gardenia.

So by the time she was doing Saturn over her Pisces Moon, holed up at Shell Cottage and preparing for another comeback, she didn’t need to seduce or signal status.

It all fits! Your birth Moon is sanctuary and inner space, a non-contender in worldly contests and the epitome of self-assurance.

Thoughts?

*She has a survivalist stellium of the Sun, Mars and Lilith flanking the Midheaven in the sign of the Sea-Goat.  Midheaven represents vocation and your reputation – she has enjoyed career longevity far beyond what many would have predicted when she first entered the public scene.

Images: 1974 – Phillip Hoare 
1995 – Mark Arbeit